Monday, March 05, 2012

novelties

As of 3.00 pm Friday, I've been on Spring Break. Which means of course beer bongs, foam raves, and general non-stop partying. Not really. Indeed, I'm wondering whether I've forgotten how to relax. Even reading novels, rather than recondite slim volumes of contemporary poetry or gnarly, ill-written works of literary & cultural criticism, makes me feel guilty, as tho I'm stealing time away from what I ought to be doing. You can take the boy out of the fundamentalist, guilt-ridden, work-ethical protestant church, I guess, but you can't take the protestant, fundamentalist, guilt-ridden work ethic out of the boy...

At least there's a tenuous Ruskin connection in Forster's Howards End (1910), which I finished re-reading last night, in a kind of ecstasy of wonder at the man's prose and the complex balancing of thought and emotion in his characters. The ill-fated Leonard Bast, that is, when we first meet him is making his way thru Stones of Venice. That reading marks him in our eyes, and in the eyes of Schlegel sisters, who're hip enough to be concerned mostly with far more current movements in art & literature, with Wedekind and Augustus John. Bast, in contrast, falls into precisely the group Stuart Eagles (After Ruskin: The Social and Political Legacies of a Victorian Prophet, 1870-1920, OUP 2011) defines as "upper-working-class and lower-middle-class autodidacts who often worked as clerks..." So that's good for at least a sentence or two, I guess, contrasting JR's readership in the 1st decade of the century with what the cool kids were reading.

On the other hand, there's really no excuse for re-reading Michael Moorcock's spectacularly hastily and sloppily written Elric novel, The Vanishing Tower (or The Sleeping Sorceress – choose your own overheated title). Maybe someday I'll put the thousands of hours of my youth (and the scores of hours of my recent middle age) I've devoted to Moorcock to some kind of use. Maybe there's a biography there to be written...